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I'm indebted to Nora Walsh, a chemistry teacher in southern Indiana who has comprehensive blog posts over on ChemEd XChange which helped me plan my own unit.

Small is better

This year, I decided to only focus on chemical reactions - their structure, interpretations, and types of reactions. In the past, I had included mol calculations as well. The intent was to help students make a direct link between the reaction ratios and material quantities, but that may have been too much of a stretch. Limiting my scope this year helped me stay laser focused on the key concepts so students could build deeper skill.

Our three learning objectives were:

1. I can identify indicators of chemical change.
2. I can balance chemical equations to satisfy the law of conservation of matter.
3. I can classify types of chemical reactions based on the equation.

Demonstrations of learning

Because these were smaller, more discrete skills, I was able to have them do more targeted practice. My colleague, Melissa, pointed me to a fantastic resource to generate unlimited balancing and reaction ID questions for students to use on their own. Chemquiz.net has dozens of classes of questions you can generate for quick, immediate feedback activities. These shorter feedback cycles helped students catch misconceptions earlier and fix mistakes prior to the test.

I also updated my assignments to have some more written response. The work they submitted was more than skill demonstration - it was skill application. They did much more demonstration on their own, but it wasn't for a score in the book. I'm attempting to shift away from, "what work am I mising?" to "I'm struggling with this skill." It seems like it's taking longer this year to make the change than it has in the past and I'm hoping this particular structure will help.

Labs!

I've tried hard this year to make sure students have hands-on work whenever possible, especially as intro material. I want them to experience chemistry in action as part of the learning process, not as a result of the end of the unit.

I found a shared folder of mini-labs that I've modified into simple experiences for students. Each reaction demonstrates one of the five indicators of chemical change (temperature change, solid formation, gas formation, color change, or odor released) as well as modeling the five types of chemical reactions.

These labs have been sprinkled through the unit as qualitative demos. Students aren't expected to take data or do deep analysis - just observe and experience. These demos are available as reference materials on test days so they can construct responses with actual chemical examples.

Changes for next year

A notable crash and burn for this unit was my attempt to use a card activity to introduce and practice balancing. In principle, it looked great - students would work together to find coefficients for balanced equations. The cards provided a tactile interface and a way to discuss and debate the process.

In reality, the cards added overhead to an idea that totally took the focus away from the skill. They struggled to conceptualize multiple copies of the cards as represented by coefficients. They had a hard time sorting through the large bag of laminated slips to find the right chemical formulas in the first place. All in all, it was a bust.

If I were to redesign that activity, I would do fewer equations and have multiple copies of the same chemical. They could add units of chemical to find a balance and then abstract those duplicates into coefficients. Live and learn for next time suppose.

One lab in particular (the iodine clock) was too early for them. It relies on temperature and concentration differences, but they haven't learned about those yet. I think next time, I'll push that into our solution chem unit so they have a better connection between reaction rates (time) and amount of reactants.

I need to do a little bit more with exothermic and endothermic reaction qualities. These are fun to demo, especially when a reaction gets colder, but students struggled to explain why endothermic reactions, when they absorb heat, feel colder to the observer. Point of reference relationships weren't really a focus and that led to some misconceptions we'll need to address.

I saw some cool stuff about AntennaPod offering a year-end summary generated from listening stats. Even cooler, it's all done locally on the phone rather than in some cloud account. Good for them.

Anyways, since getting a teaching position at the local high school, my commute time has dropped from 40 minutes each way to about 10 minutes. I could never focus on listening and working at the same time, so my commute was my main time to listen.

Beyond drive time I felt bored with what I would listen to. That's on me for not branching out but - there are bits here and there but most series felt worn out and just rehashes of topics they'd already discussed in earlier shows.

I feel like I'm also preferring written work, kind of like ignoring the tutorial video because I prefer a written guide. Podcasts feel kind of like the video tutorial when I would prefer to do a longer reading session.

Maybe I'll come back some day, but for now I think my podcast listening days are mostly behind me. I don't think podcasting is dead and I actually think it's one of the more accessible forms of creative media, especially for students. I just think it's interesting that my preferences for down time entertainment have changed so dramatically in so short a time.

Test days are tough for my students because they need to be able to show skills in practice. This year, we're not giving any rote exams - there are no multiple choice questions and no true/false statements to guess on. Students are being asked to put skills into practice on their assessments. As a support, all of the tests this year are open note - students can reference their materials to build responses because I'm looking for application.

I don't stand up front and teach much. I try to spiral the activities so basics get built upon incrementally to develop the skills they'll be tested on. This can take time and it's uncomfortable because there is no "end" to an idea or concept. They can't put a skill in the rear-view mirror and just carry on to the next assignment.

Building up the productive struggle capacity helps students develop resiliency and work toward the end goal of being able to do the thing. Finding the balance between too easy and too hard is tough, especially when students arne't used to that kind of work. Metering out activities so they build their own meaning is the biggest challenge because many just give up. On my part, I need to resist the urge to jump in and confirm or deny their initial responses.

One thing that would help is closing the feedback loop. Some of these tasks are paper and pencil, so there is a gap in between completing the task and the feedback that comes with it. Using some digital tools can help, but then the device battle is on. Having some tangible, disconnected tasks helps with attention but feels harder for them in the moment.

I talked with students today about how many are doing double the work. They're so focused on what they're missing from not working with the system in place that they're falling further behind with the current material. There is time enough to do all the things, but it's up to them to engage in the work to make progress.

My wife and I have vastly different preferences for casual listening music. We don't disagree on everything, but I tend to listen to early-mid 2000's emo/punk metal and hardcore when I want something on the background and she's more into American folk and acoustic.

Our kids decided they wanted us each to pick two songs and they would vote on which was better. We indulged the children and my wife graciously let me turn on two songs that would normally never be played outside of some earbuds in the house.

The first one I picked was a fantastic cover of Hey Ya by Alex Melton. The video includes a short intro on why he covered it this way vs the slower versions you normally hear.

The next one I chose was still fast and driving, but much heavier. He is Legend is an old hardcore band and their song The Seduction is good one to get pumped up to.

The music video for this song is worth watching - the story is told as a puppet show with a Mario-like story and a giant purple metal-vocals monster. Also, I'm not sure why there was a trend of metal drummers not wearing shirts in music videos, but that's a thing you'll see here.

My wife had some good stuff, too. This is a group from the early 2010's called The Oh Hellos. I'll need to listen to some more of their music sometime.

A favorite we both share is Gregory Alan Isakov. I actually got to see him perform live in Chicago this year, which was a treat.

Anyways, in the end, the kids voted my music as the funniest, which wasn't the original challenge at all, but it felt great to win.

This is my first year teaching with Google Classroom. It's tough to counteract the kool-aid that is Google stuff in schools, but it's safe to say that I'm definitely not a fan of the platform. It's not an LMS and it doesn't really make things easier to find or complete. It handles document creation and sharing permissions really well, but it isn't anything that could be done earlier with tools like Doctopus (which was incredible, by the way).

Alas, here I am. I come from Canvas, which has issues of its own, but I find myself really missing the flexibility of linking different items together in the LMS. Mainly, if I use a rubric to score something in Classroom, the only way to get that data is to go back to the assignment to find that student's data. There is no overall student page with aggregated data for each assignment shown in a useful way. It's not even possible to scrape because it's all a bunch of javascript instead of useful data.

I think my best discovery so far is the "picture upload" assignment. I can have students do work right into their notebooks, which means fewer copies, and it's all in context with the instruction. They submit a picture to an assignmentin Classroom and I have some nice annotation tools to leave feedback right on the photo. They can look on their paper and make adjustments as necessary rather than waiting for me to stand over their shoulder and point.

In addition to photos for submissions, you can unlink rubrics from the assignment score for qualitative feedback against standards (or other criteria). It took me a while to figure out, but I use this a lot. But, like I mentioned above, you have to prompt students to go back to the assignment to see that feedback. And you can't export it. At all.

...and yeah, that's about it. Other than making feedback a little nicer and being able to annotate student uploads, it's really just a firehose of stuff. The feedback cycle is kind of facilitated, but without better notifications or a way to get back to those cyclical things, it's a one-way stream of information.

Given all that we know about how people learn, it's sad that companies really shoot for the low hanging fruit and let marketing and hype take care of the defecits. It's even more disappointing that so many buy into it wholesale.

Yesterday, I did something dumb: I let my own attitude get in the way of modeling appropraite responses to behaviors. It started with a simple seating chart change. They're always a big deal because students like the familiarity of sitting in the same place with the same people. The switch this time was to help groups of students at different levels of achievement on a test talk about their mistakes and do a little peer teaching. The problems are that A) I didn't prep them for that kind of work, and B) I didn't clearly explain the reason for the change.

I let me own annoyance at their annoyance get the better of me. I kind of reamed out once class in particular. Instead of taking a step back and asking them to trust the process I had in place, I threw the same attitude back at them. Which led to a really great rest of class.

I'm more embarrassed about my own response than I am annoyed at the response to new seats. I need to own that I didn't model an age-appropriate response to their own anxieties. That's the next best step - recognize that our responses to frustration compounded one another and we all suffered as a result.

The classroom is a community and we all impact it one way or the other. My own attitude has an outsized effect on that community given the nature of my role. I'm back today with fresh eyes and ready to move on slightly more wise than I was yesterday.

We're in the middle of writing chemical formulas and names right now and this unit is just mind numbingly boring. It's important for fluency and foundational for chemical reactions, but I just don't have a good way to tell a better story about ionic compound naming.

My attempt this year is to at least turn some of the practice into a small game. This is something we'll use mid-unit to mix the practice up a little bit. The focus is on writing and naming compounds after you've done transition metals and polyatomic ions, but you can substitute any of the ions on the template for any level of bonding.

Each group needs two differently colored dice. They have 10 rolls to write different ionic compound formulas and names. The instructions on the template say to get to at least 35 points, but you could have teams roll until someone gets 10 unique compounds.

You can grab a copy of the template here (Google doc link).

You could mix up a couple different versions of the template and have more variety in the names found. Groups can work together to write the names and get more practice in that way, too.

It isn't much, but I'm hoping it adds a little variety to the routine. If you make modifications or if you have other ideas on how to make this chapter less of a drag, feel free to get in touch via email.

A couple weeks ago, I managed to write a post from my phone because I finally took the time to get my site build process pushed to the server. Today, I spent a few minutes Googling and tweaking to get a better mobile flow set up.

Termux is a handy Android terminal emulator which let me get the pieces connected. To test publishing from my phone, I wrote a short post using nano which was a less-than-ideal experience.

I reinstalled Markor, a great Markdown editor for Android to use as my writing platform. It lets you navigate between directories on the phone and has a nice writing interface. It also lets you set up templates, so my post front matter is ready to go when I start a new post.

The hardest part was getting my repo into shared storage. By default, Termux doesn't have shared storage access because you don't need it for anything. I finally found a blog post which pointed me to the Termux wiki termux-setup-storage to show the storage permission popup. I copied my repo into a shared folder and presto: I can now use Markor to edit.

Baby steps.

There are very few bands that leave significant lasting impressions on me. I'm kind of picky and I have specific tastes, so I don't explore new music too much and prefer to listen to my regulars. This morning at work, I came across a live album put out by The Postal Service and it brought back how wonderful and memorable that group was. They only put out one album in 2003 as an experiment in writing and recording music by sending physical tracks back and forth across the country and I still rememeber almost every word to every song. Listening threw me right back into my old 1994 Ford Tempo with the tape casette adapter.

My biggest weakness, by far, is not planning far enough ahead in teaching. I know generally where I want to be on a given day, but I often don't finalize what I'm doing until the day before (or even the morning of in some cases). This, by the way, is not a good thing. It means I'm feeling rushed or flustered more often than not. I know the content but I need to get better at knowing in what order and when I'm teaching the content.

I took some of my own advice and got in touch with our instructional coach. My department is great but they've all been teaching the same courses for years and I'm just returning to the classroom after several years of coaching myself. I felt like I needed a good, grounded conversation with a third person to get some solid plans in place.

I have to say - it was wonderful. I can only hope my interactions as a coach were as thorough, as supportive, and as non-judgemental as my talk was yesterday. She challenged me to do two things:

1. Think ahead two weeks. That's a good span of time to vet what I've planned and to make adjustments if anything needs to be changed based on student skills or assessment results. More than two weeks is overkill because it may all be changed eventually and two weeks is digestible. The other benefit is to have copies ready one week ahead so at that point, I'm locked in.
2. Put together a master binder for the semester. Unit by unit, activity by activity. Including all of the planned notes, both blank and filled in. This gives me a paper copy I can flip through in one spot so I'm not hunting for files or presentations in my drive. Making notes on those pages will give me a single source of truth for locations and any edits that need to be made year over year.

Thinking back, my student teaching didn't really prep me to think this way. My mentor was wonderful in every way, but she also flew a little loose. So, I stared using the same methods, but I think that has hurt me in the long run. Over the next several weeks, I'm going to really push to have solid plans two weeks ahead. The beginning will be hard because I need to plan two weeks form now as well as two weeks out, so almost a month in advance. That will let me get on to a good roatation by the winter break and be ready to head into the second semester.

Baby steps...

The other day, I got my blog moved solely to my VPS and buildong from a git push. That will let me write from either of our home computers instead of relying on just one to write, build, and then push a published site dorectory up.

I got curious about how else I could write, so I went exploring and discovered Termux, an Android terminal emulator that I'd heard of but never actually used. It's surprisingly robust because I was able.to install got, openssh, and a couple other pqckages to get my site source cloned on to my phone. This.post was written using nano on my phone, which is super bizarre.

since I just need directory access to write Markdown files, I think my next step is to find a nice, simple Markdown editor to do the composing and then pop into Termux to commit and.push my updates. I'm excited about more options for writing on the fly with this.

One of my goals this month was to make my publishing more flexible. I'm finally publising with a git hook, rebuilding this site on the server (8 seconds) instead of slowly building it on a Chromebook (35+ seconds).

AndiS put me on the right track back at the start of the month. Tonight, with a little more help from Brandon and a bunch of Googling, I got it working.

I'm using a pre-receive hook based on a 2014 post from Jason Stitt because the console will display the progress and fail in case something goes wrong instead of publishing a busted site.

Now that I have this all centrallized on my VPS, I can pull the repo on to any machine and pick up with the writing.

Every time I test, I'm reminded that multiple means of expression are important when assessing students. Finding ways to get kids to tell you what they know is critical.

I have a student who is inconsistent - at best - with turning things in. If I see someething turned in, that's a good day. Their tests and quizzes haven't been great, but at least I'm seeing work becuase it's a more controlled situation.

That student came and asked how they can improve their grade. I asked if they wanted to talk over the material, stretching back to standards from the beginning of the year that I hadn't seen any evidence of understanding on.

This student could tell me everything - and I mean everything - that'd we'd done so far. In detail. They talked about phases of matter. They talked about energy levels in particles. They talked about atomic structure, forming isotopes, and how the periodic table is essentially a super tool for all things chemistry.

I was floored. I was also humbled. I had fallen back into the mindset of the written piece serving as a source of truth for evidence of learning without making space for other options. Now, this student recognizes the importance of turning things in, and we're going to work on that. But their over all grade should not reflect what's essentially an organizational skill.

The point of a grade is to represent what a student knows and can do. I need to remember to make space for those non-traditional methods of demonstration.

I got a suggestion to write about how I stay organized during the teaching day and I thought that was a great idea. My organizational strategies have changed over time mainly depending on my work and the types of projects I needed to do. Now that I'm back to teaching, my systems are changing again.

Pen and paper

I used to rely on a lot of tech becuase I was on my computer for a large part of the day. Now, I'm back to hand-written notes for just about everything. All of my immediate todos get put on sticky notes right next to my mouse so when I do sit down, I can take care of that correspondence or finishing grading that paper.

I used to keep a pretty significant bullet journal, but since I'm not managing a team or attending meetings during the week, it has lost its utility for me. I don't need to keep track of several moving pieces across departments or follow up on specific project to do's any more. My black grid notebook has been neglected, but it's there, ready for some love when I figure out how it'll play into my organizational strategies.

There isn't quite enough room in it for lesson planning, which is why I switched back over to a legal pad. I have a yellow legal pad with each page broken down into two columns (two classes) and five rows (five days each week). I can jot down the main points for the day and make notes in the margins for what papers need to be printed and copied on what days to be ready. It's easy to flip back and forth and make sure my progressions make sense and I can adjust easily enough if I need to speed up or slow down based on assessments.

Drive

We're a Google school, so all of my documents live in Google Drive. We have a shared department drive with resouces for each science course and we regularly collaborate and clean those up. Instead of editing those for my classes, I typically make copies into my own folders and then add things like scoring guides, references to the learning standards, or just make the margins more narrow. The content stays the same but my formatting preferences keep things consistent for my classes.

Email

I'm fortunate to be in a school where there isn't too much email flying around. On a heavy day I might get five emails in my school inbox. Many days it is just one or two. Nonetheless, I've set up some email filters to catch certain kinds of messages, like sharing notices from Google Drive, student emails via Google Classroom, or notes from our interventionist on students they're working with and other student documentation tasks they may need help with. Those filters put the messages unread into labels so a quick glance tells me if I need to reply or if I'm caught up on those other kinds of responsibilities.

Getting organized for teaching was one of the harder transitions to make from my old work, but I'm getting back into the flow. Scheduling at least a week ahead helps me to know where I'm going and allows me to focus planning and after school time to student feedback to drive learning.

Sometimes, you just need to make a point in class. A small comment or sidebar conversation is a way to do that verbally, but other times, it's more helpful to be subtle.

I'm battling a ton of phone use in two of my classes. Boys are on a game, girls are usually on Snapchat. This means their attention isn't focused on productive thinking routines and my attention is pushed toward management rather than teaching. That's a bad classroom mix and not a good way to promote learning. Students are convinced they can do more than one thing at a time but all the research points to context switching being a bad thing for learning.

Instead of lecturing students on phone use - again - I decided to take a more subtle approach. That started with making a really stupid app.

See the Pen Counter by Brian (@bbennett) on CodePen.

It's an incremental counter and a timer. If the counter is on zero, the timer will count how many seconds it stays at zero. If it's incremented at all, the timer resets to zero.

While they were working on day, I slid this in a small window up on to the projector and counted up the phones I saw being used for anything other than school (there are some legit uses). I stayed at the front, just scanning the room, and updating the total as phones came out and went away. Slowly, some whispers started about what I was doing. Some observant individuals put the puzzle together and word quickly spread to put phones away.

Once they were all away, the timer started counting and then game was afoot. Some table groups were convinced they could "beat" the game (not sure how...) and came up with some social rules like:

• All phones face down, last one to receive a notification wins
• No touching at pain of an ear flick
• Phones go away because Mr. Bennett shouldn't have to custom code a counter to make a point.

This was definitely a gimmick, but I think it was helpful that they saw, at one point, a full half of the class was distracted and off task. I did remind them that my energy is better spent teaching and not on counting phones. I think they got the point? I'm not sure.

I'm implementing voluntary phone jail this week as a way to have students self-regulate. The phone can either go into a shoe organizer hanging in a safe space so they can see it, but cannot access it. The other option is a brown paper lunch bag stapled shut on their desk so it's nearby but inaccessible. If the voluntary approach doesn't work, some will be compelled to surrender their device to help them actually learn some self restraint and maybe even some chemistry.

There will be an update in the near future. If you'd like to use the dumb phone counter, you're more than welcome to give it a shot. Send me an email and I can add your comments to the post with your experience.

This has been a whirlwind couple of weeks and I can't really find enough coherent thought for a single-topic blog post. I thought I had written a couple of ideas down, but my notebook is pretty much a list of papers that need to be copied and doodles of birds. Not much help for the blog.

So, in an effort to clear my mind of some clutter, I present a colleciton of teaching thoughts in no particular order:

1. I don't give enough quizzes. Given that I focus on performing skills, frequent formal assessment needs to be a bigger part of my repertoire. That will also help students see the point in standards-based grading and that quizzes, when given frequently enough, are a great way to track learning progress.
2. The quiz they took this week on using the periodic table to find electron configurations went pretty well. I was able to single some people out today for follow-up instruction that also went well, so skippy for me.
3. Cell phones are a major distraction. Especially since Retro Bowl College was released.
4. At least they're thinking about college. Kind of.
5. I would like to find more day to day connections for chemistry. A student challenged me to name a time when he would use reactivity in his career plan (HVAC). I was able to zing him back with, "Why does HVAC use galvanized metal?" which is the exact reason why he needs to learn about reactivity.
6. There are only so many ways to ask questions about valence electrons and I'm getting bored finding them all. I need to students to write and deliver their own quizzes to peers or something.

I think that's it for this evening. Like I said, it's been a little bit of a whirlwind couple of weeks. One of my problems with writing more frequently is that I'm locked into writing on one computer in the evenings right now. This blog is all static pages, so I need to move it to a server build rather than a local build. I just need to take time to do that.

Until next time...be well.

My friend Phil has taught me a lot about intentional teaching. He would frequently remind me that curriculum is much more than the content - it is the skills, knowledge, and dispositions we want students to have as a result of taking our classes. The content is a component - skills and knowledge are part of the curriculum - but we also want students to develop dispositions which will help them be successful after high school.

I'm not naive - I know the vast majority of my students won't be chemists and I'm fine with that truth. What I really want my students to have when they leave is a greater appreciation for science as a process and a little bit of science literacy. This is the hard part of teaching.

Teaching content is easy. I can stand up front and talk or play a video and ask students some basic knowledge questions. Teaching skills is a little more complicated because they need opportunities to develop those skills. I can st up labs and have them take measurements and capture data. Not as easy as straight content but also not too much harder.

Dispositions. That's the kicker.

Dispositions take intentionality. To get students to change the way they think about the world means I'm planning experiences and assessments which actually force them to think differently. Every minute of that experience has to build toward a climax where they're faced with some kind of information that doesn't quite fit their existing models of the world and they're forced to change their schema. That's hard to do.

This year, my chemistry teaching counterpart and I are working hard to make sure students do some real science. That means taking samples, collecting data, and asking them to draw conclusions about that data. Questions like, "Is this right?" don't make sense anymore becuase there's no way to check "rightness" in a scientific setting. Rightness is in reproducability and in quality of data. These are skills that need to be developed.

This all sounds great but it really puts students into a funk. Students who are able to coast through classes doing the business of school struggle to apply ideas. Students who don't engage also struggle because the work is overwhelming and they don't have the mental stamina to engage. The middle crowd - kids who are willing to engage and take the help and guidance I can provide - are the ones who benefit the most.

We just wrapped up a big soil science interlude unit. They took some soil samples from an experimental plot we set up at school and then did some basic chemistry to draw some conclusions. The middle group excelled and saw some great results. The tails of population either wanted answers and felt frustrated the whole time or just shut down entirely.

I'm hoping that repeated exposure to the disciplines of science will help build the stamina they need to push into later investigations. Building these specific experiences will help them, hopefully, develop dispositons which can be applied anywhere down the road.

We're finishing our first month of school and I'm thinking a lot about my grading system. I use standards-based grading, which boils down to the majority of a student's grade coming from skills they can demonstrate and do rather than the papers it took to get there. The entire point of SBG is to make sure that students are focused on learning and not assignments. The trick is that it takes assignments - and work - in order to learn the skills.

I've done a lot this year to put standards front and center, including giving students several ways to track their progress. I still haven't cracked the nut of getting them to look at skill development over assignment completion. Arthur Chiaravalli talks about how many SBG systems still fail because of complexity and the fact that a score is still often tied to the feedback, which defeats the purpose. He is also candid about the effort it takes to help students develop skill through feedback. I am grading a ton right now and I am feeling the pain of wanting to give quality feedback on as much as I can.

I also struggle with disconnected systems of feedback and how mutiple outlets for feedback make it hard for students to focus on what makes the most sense. While I was Googling for ideas, I came across a post from an old friend, Ramsey Musallam, who has tried to streamline his assessment into digital and physical notebooks. I've got my students using interactive learning logs, based on fantastic models from Lee Ferguson which has helped many take better notes and actually learn how to reference materials in writing. But it still feels like too many moving pieces.

I think the crux of my issue is that I want students to own their learning. And I say that completely aware that school does not necessarily equate to learning. We learn all the time and own that learning far from the classroom. But, I have an opportunity to help students build life-long learning skills and part of that is the metacognitive process of reflecting on growth. Providing them with tools and setting up a structure which fosters reflection for growth is the end goal.

I'm not really sure what to do for chemistry at this point. I know I need to grade less and that I need to streamline feedback outlets. I've figured out how to put no-score rubrics in Google Classroom (that's another post) so they can get quick feedback in the context of their digital work. All of their physical papers have the same type of quick feedback indicators. What I really need to do is build the habit of looking at their feedback and cataloging it somewhere. Paper and pencil is what I'm going to continue to push and I'm going to specifically build it into each week.

I'm also considering some more portfolio-based ungrading options for my environmental science class as a small pilot group. It's an advacned science elective and I have a lot more freedom in how I run that course. I talked with those students about the potential for portfolios and one-on-one meetings and I'll see what they think tomorrow after they've had some time to chew on it. I don't know if I'm ready to take that jump down to chemistry yet (I'd also need to convince the other teacher that it's not a terrible idea), but maybe I can learn some lessons before bringing that option up.

In the end, I think I know my answer, even though I want to tear it down and start over. I need to simplify and set up systems of refelction as part of the learning cycle to help students track skill development and not worry so much about specific assignments. The activities help build skill and if they take more of the ownership in identifying their strengths and weaknesses, maybe I can move the needed a little bit more in the next month.

Today was one of our Work Days on the farm. We have work days all the time, but this day each year is when we all - the whole family - come together to prepare food that we have raised and cared for so it can care for us.

We raise our own meat here on the farm. Pork, cattle, and chicken. The chickens are our most hands-on project with the animals because they live and die with us. We raise them every year in a sustainable, healthy, dignified way because it helps produce healthy animals and gives nutrition back into the ground they live on. Every year, we plan for and work to come to the end of the Work Day knowing that we've fed three families with that effort.

Every year, I feel an immense sense of accomplishment in how well we finish the work. Our kids also get to see an entire set of functional, respectful, and caring adults take lives in order to sustain others. This year, we had the privilege of involving our kids even more. As they get older, they begin to better understand the sacrifices we make to take care of these animals and why working for our food is a good thing to do.

I'm tired. My feet hurt and my hands are a little raw. But I get to go to bed tonight knowing that we've all grown up a little bit more today. For now, we get to rest.

Today was the first day I put standards grades into my gradebook. We took our unit test yesterday and I've generally waited until about then to put zeroes in the gradebook. This is always a shock to students because those standard assignments are only 1 point but they weigh 80% of the overall grade. So, this early in the semester, one missing standard can drop you 15% or 16% easily.

I'm thinking about grading schemes and, more importantly, how to communicate progress to students before scores go in. There are a few things I'm going to try different with this next chapter:

1. More references to their outcomes tracker. I'm updating that regularly and as much as I don't want them to have to go to another site, it's really the best way for them to keep an eye on standards-aligned feedback for everything they do.
2. Paper/pencil tracking of feedback will go into their notebooks. More on that in my last post.
3. Scores for proficient standards will go in before test date so only unmet standards will be blanks (or turned to zeroes) after that test attempt.
4. A better way to communicate overall test results to students. With this one, they had to look at a given standard across multiple questions and it led to some ambiguity about they actually did. A common example was a standard in one question being marked "proficient" while the same standard was "needs work" on a different question. Are they proficient or not? Or is it an average of the two?

Ambiguous.

Grades are motivating to students, but not in the way I want them to be. Grades are a means to an end - if they get good grades, they can do the other stuff. It's early days, but I'm starting that uphill battle of moving students away from, "How do I change my grade?" to "I need help with this concept."

The same story has played out in the past and I know it'll come back, but these early days of scores going in make it hard to remember that the long game is more important than easing a little bit of pain now.